1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus that is connected to multiple information processing apparatuses via a network and includes an input apparatus inputs pointing information and a display output apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
There are screen sharing techniques and application software in which arbitrary points on the screen of a given terminal (a home site) can be pointed to from external sites, and such points pointed to at multiple sites can be shared on a single screen of the terminal. One typical example is software such as VNC in which the screen of a home site can be operated from other sites. By performing operations on the home site from other sites in this way, a pointer of the home site performs a pointing function, and pointing operations by the pointer can be viewed simultaneously both at the home site on which the operations are being performed and at the other sites from which the operations are being performed (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/dtg/attarchive/vnc/).
As another example, in a conference system such as WebEx, a screen on which exactly the same display content can be viewed from each site is shared between sites, and when a pointing operation is performed on that screen, it can be seen which site has performed the pointing operation. In such cases, because the conditions in which pointing operations have been performed are also shared, pointing operations from other sites can be viewed at the home site (WebEx: http://www.webex.co.jp/).
Furthermore, an input pointer display method and apparatus are known as a technique for controlling a pointer (Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 7-230357). The technique disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 7-230357 is such that in the case where a pointer of the home site is positioned close to an operation target, the pointer is hidden in order to facilitate viewing of the operation target.
However, the techniques described in the above related art have the following problems.
In the case of a VNC mechanism (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/dtg/attarchive/vnc/), there are a limited number of points that can be pointed to simultaneously. In this case, pointing operations are performed by a pointer of the home site, so the number of points that can be pointed to simultaneously is limited to the number of pointers of the home site.
With WebEx (http://www.webex.co.jp/), although the number of points to be pointed to can be increased or decreased according to the number of sites, a region that can be pointed to is limited to the shared window that is being shared between sites. For this reason, in an environment where there are multiple shared windows, pointing operations cannot be performed across those shared windows. In addition, because of the fact that this shared window is managed by a server and that pointing information regarding pointing operations is also distributed via the server to each site as information combined with window information regarding the shared window, response time increases.
Furthermore, in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 7-230357, although there is no problem in hiding the pointer for viewing of a window, such a hidden pointer may cause difficulties in use during actual operation.